I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

People in the U.K. share my bemusement with the United States that America doesn't share with itself. They have a sense of irony, which America doesn't have, seeing as it's being run by fundamentalists who take things literally.

I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.

And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else's, I'm happy to do it.

I think the air in New York is death.

From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me.

What might be happening in human beings who experience near death is that they are getting cold, but before they get so cold that they would die, they're actually diminishing their oxygen consumption in a way that is unknown. And that extends their survival limits, so they can appear dead but actually not be dead.

Like so many of us, I'm brokenhearted about the death of the remarkably talented actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.